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7 Best WordPress Plugins for New Developers

When you decide to create your own blog, it’s highly likely that you’ll run across WordPress. WordPress is the best blogging site for new writers as its fairly easy to set up. Once you have everything set up, you’ll want to improve it, which is where plugins come in. Here are a few of the best WordPress plugins for new developers.

Do you want your blog to get noticed? Of course you do! This is why you want to boost your SEO, and Infinite SEO is going to help you do just that. You’ll be able to boost your site’s ranking through a variety of methods, including Moz integration, sitewide links, Title and meta data optimization, and more. You’ll be able to register your site with Google and Bing, and you can set various sitemaps, like excluding images, excluding tags, and more.

Cart66 will handle all of your e-commerce needs. It’s free; it’ll make your store PCI compliant; and it handles all sorts of transactions—physical, digital, and even subscriptions. It includes fifty different payment gateways, so you can accept money through any avenue that you want. It really takes the functionality of several different plugins and rolls them all into one plugin.

This completely free plugin will allow you to accept money from investors, or from the occasional kind soul that wants to toss a couple of dollars you way. This gives you the option to crowdfund anything that you want without going through a third party! It’s compatible with WePay, Stripe, and PayPal. There are also two premium themes for it, Fundify and Campaignify, that provide several different purposes. Fundify themes your site similar to Kickstarter, while Campaignify highlights a single project instead of multiple projects.

You’ll need to have a simple way for people to share your page around to their friends and family, and this is the perfect plugin to help. Using JetPack Social Sharing, which is completely free, you’ll be able to have buttons that will allow the user to instantly share the content over a variety of social media networks, including Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, LinkedIn, Tumblr, and more. If you need to add a new button, you can click “add a new service” and add whatever you want, and you can even add a Captcha to the email button.

The WordPress Notification Bar does exactly what it sounds like it does. It’ll display a notification bar at the top of your page to alert you to any notifications. You can choose any color you like, and you can even add custom messages or calls to action. There’s support for multiple languages as well, so if you speak German, Persian, or Turkish, you’re in luck! Support for other languages is on the way as well.

It’s not unheard of for WordPress blogs to get hacked, so you want to stay secure! For a measly $10, Security Ninja will take care of everything. It prevents 0-day exploits; it will provide help for quick fixes; and it’ll even perform more than 25 tests to make sure that you site is secure, including brute force attacks. The plugin is constantly updated, and they offer live support right on the site, so if you have any issues, you’ll be immediately taken care of. In the event that something happens, you’ll want to have an extremely fast Internet connection to get your site back online as quickly as possible, so you should consider a high-speed Century Link service to keep you connected.

With all of these plugins, you’re going to want to back everything up. BackupBuddy will help you do just that! Though it costs a bit of money, it’ll backup your whole site, including plugins, widgets, and every single piece of content. You’ll also be able to restore your work, should you need to. There are four tiers to this plugin. You can grab two licenses for $80, ten licenses for $100, or an unlimited number of licenses for $150.

WordPress is an extremely flexible platform to use, and these plugins will help protect your content. After everything’s secure, check out all the different themes and find one that perfectly fits your site. Do you have a WordPress site? If so, what plugins do you use? Leave a comment below and let us know!

About Me

WordPress already allows you to create an “About Me” sidebar on your blog, so you might wonder if using a separate plugin is worth it. This widget, however, makes the process super simple so you don’t have to fret about formatting or alignment issues. It’s worth a try.

A well-presented blog can serve as a stepping stone to growing your business and really showing off your design talents. The above plugins can help you craft that beautiful blog.

Teddy Hunt is a freelance content writer and designer with a focus on technology. When not behind a computer, Teddy spends the majority of his free time outdoors and resides in Tampa, Florida.